(Alert) These 8 Twitter Analytics Metrics Spell YOUR Success

Twitter Analytics help you understand how the content you share on the platform is working for your business.

But you have to know these key metrics and Twitter Analytics tools, otherwise it’s worthless. In this post, I’ll dive into the most important ones.

In this article, you’ll learn:

• How to access Twitter analytics
• Which metrics to focus on
• The top tools (outside of Twitter) for Twitter analytics and reporting
• 7 ways to use Twitter analytics to drive engagement and conversions

How to Find Analytics on Twitter

You can access Twitter Analytics by selecting Analytics from your profile’s drop-down menu. Once you land on the page, you’ll notice that Twitter spreads this information across a few different areas. Here’s the “anatomy” of your analytics lineup:

Tweet Activity Dashboard

Your Tweet activity dashboard is where you can review metrics related to each Tweet you send. You’ll know exactly how many people have seen each Tweet and see stats related to how many likes, replies, and retweets you’re getting.

Audience Insights Dashboard

Your dashboard contains information about your followers. Here, you’ll track metrics related to growth and learn more about your followers’ demographics, interests, and preferences.  

More specifically, these insights include the number of engagements, impressions, clicks, views, and more. See how engagement rates and impressions change over time and learn more about the types of content that are working—or not.

Campaign Dashboard

Your Campaign Dashboard houses all Twitter analytics related to paid ad campaigns. Like the Audience Insights Dashboard, you can see how posts performed based on metrics like engagement rate, cost per action, and impressions.

But, the Campaign Dashboard goes deeper. Review results based on campaign objectives, compare performance and look at the segments responding best to your ads.

 

 

Which Metrics to Track

Of course, Twitter is loaded with metrics. And generally speaking, access to data is a positive thing.

However, it can be a bit overwhelming for marketers trying to hone in on the areas that reveal the most critical information about their social media performance.

Here is a list of the metrics most likely to help you make the most of your Twitter account.

1. Top Tweets

In your Tweets Dashboard, you’ll see detailed information about your outgoing Tweets. Under the graph section, you’ll see another section that highlights recent Tweet performance.

 

Here, you can see which messaging people liked most and use that information to inform your Twitter strategy moving forward. Pay attention to trends as they change over time.

Top Tweets is a great place to get a benchmark of what’s working for your social strategy.

Take note of what types of content your audience clicks most. Do videos outperform images? Do tweets with or without links do better?

It’s these types of questions you should answer as you start developing a content strategy.

2. Consumer Behavior

Consumer behavior is an important metric, as it uncovers a wealth of information about followers’ shopping habits and preferences. What types of brands do they like—premium brands or discounted goods?

Check this section regularly to see if your brand is connecting with people most likely to buy from you. If there’s a disconnect between who follows and who your ideal customer is, it’s time to make some changes to your message.

3. Followers

Twitter Analytics has a considerable advantage when it comes to follower insights.

A lot of third-party services can’t provide details on content that followers find most interesting. The followers’ dashboard will reveal things like the top ten accounts your followers follow, as well as top and unique interests, broken down by percentage.

4. Audiences

Twitter’s Audiences tab is where you’ll find all kinds of info about the people who follow your account. When you go to the audience insights page, you’ll get the zoomed-out view of your follower growth spanning the past 90 days.

While this tab represents more general information, it’s useful in that you can see the full breakdown of your follower composition from interests to income, net worth, and gender.

5. Impressions

Under the Tweet activity section, you can see the number of impressions each Tweet generated. Impressions aren’t the most important metric to track, but it does reveal how many people see your content.

Review this metric on a monthly basis to make sure that you’re getting in front of the most people possible. In a month with higher impressions did you Tweet more often than usual? Did an influencer retweet a post? Look for any actions you can replicate to earn more impressions moving forward.

What impressions don’t tell you is, how interesting or relevant your content is to your audience.

6. Link Click-Throughs

Link click-throughs measure the number of times that your audience clicks through to your a web page from Twitter.

Click-throughs come from organic and paid posts and help you identify the headlines and calls-to-action that click with your audience.

7. Impressions by Time of Day

This metric reveals the time of day when people see your tweets most. Impressions aren’t super relevant when it comes to measuring performance. For example, a lot of people might see a Tweet and have no interest in learning more.

But, impressions by the time of day can reveal whether you’re sending your messages at the right time. Chances are, you’re not scheduling messages at 5 am while (hopefully) everyone is still asleep.

8. Engagement Rate

Engagement rates represent the sum of all engagements (likes, mentions, replies, and retweets) divided by the number of impressions, then multiplied by 100.  This little equation (which Twitter calculates for you) represents the percentage of followers who had some interaction with your content.

Engagement is one of the more revealing metrics in the dashboard, as this gives marketers an idea of how effective their messaging is.

If you’re receiving low engagement, it might mean that you need to add more compelling visuals like short videos or images to your posts.

Twitter Analytics Tools

Twitter’s built-in analytics tools have almost everything you’d need to understand how your Tweets are performing and which areas might need a little help.

Things like hashtag performance or lead generation results aren’t reflected in the built-in reporting suite. Below, we’ll briefly go over some of the tools that can help fill in the blanks:

Buffer

Buffer is a popular scheduling app that allows you to plan your social media efforts in advance.

It also provides an easy-to-understand break down of your Tweet performance. Buffer also suggests the best times for every post — allowing you to spend less time poring over your Tweets by time of day data in your dashboard.

Klear

Klear is a tool that focuses primarily on influencer marketing. The platform allows you to track Twitter’s most influential voices and uncover who wields the most influence in your niche area.

While Twitter’s home dashboard provides insights into which handles drove the most engagement — Klear takes things a step further and shows you other influencers that might help you expand your reach.

RiteTag

RiteTag gives you instant suggestions for hashtags based on real-time engagement. The tool helps marketers identify high-performing hashtags based on the text and images you plan to share.

This tool stands to help you get in front of a larger audience, though you’re still on the hook for creating quality content people want to click on.

Keyhole

A third-party analytics tool, Keyhole lets you track conversions and uncover customer sentiment. This gives you more context for how people feel about your brand or your competitors by tracking relevant keywords and hashtags.

Keyhole really shines in that it allows you to understand the “why” behind your performance and helps you learn how to create more engaging tweets. Like Buffer the tool allows you to spend less time in the dashboard by showing top performers and optimal posting times.

Using Twitter Analytics to Drive Conversions and Growth

Twitter Analytics reveal which Tweets generate the most likes, impressions, and click-throughs. There’s an awful lot of data to sort through, so where does one begin?

Below, we’ll look at some more specific ways that you can use your findings to drive more traffic through Twitter and connect with your audience.

Plan More Effective Tweets

Use the Tweet activity dashboard to track your top performers. As you start to understand what content works for your audience, you’ll start to identify a formula for effective Tweets.

What language resonates with your audience? Do videos perform better than plain text? Do some cards work better than others?

Pay attention to the neglected Tweets, too. What commonalities exist within these under-performers?

Get to Know Your Audience

What do your followers have in common, aside from following the same account? Your followers’ dashboard contains several insights about commonalities and demographics.

Beyond that, the Audience dashboard allows you to take a deeper dive into personas. Twitter’s tool lets you learn about specific groups like millennials, parents, or people who meet a certain income threshold.

Once you find the persona you’d like to target, you can create ad campaigns that speak to that group’s interests.

Grow Your Following with Hashtags

Hashtags are a way to make your posts searchable, an SEO of sorts for your social media accounts.

Use industry hashtags or those trending with influencers in your niche to capture audience attention.

Capitalize on popular hashtags based on trending topics or events. Here, you don’t want to go overboard with every pop-cultural mention — pick and choose which ones have some relevance to your brand, or else it will look like you’re just trying to clickbait your followers.

Use Twitter Cards

Twitter cards allow you to attach rich media — videos and photos — that drive traffic to your website. The goal is to help you gain more visibility on Twitter.  Cards are more visually engaging than your average Tweet as they put media front and center.

What’s more, you can use Cards to drive traffic to a specific landing page or app download by adding a snippet of code to your site; so you can see the direct impact your Tweets have on your marketing goals.

Engage with Influencers

Find influencers inside the Trends report, which will reveal the top people and brands frequently mentioned with your account.

Reviewing this metric is useful for a couple of reasons. For one, it helps you identify a potential brand advocate with a wide reach. Second, it serves as a benchmarking tool for establishing an influencer outreach strategy.

Track Conversions

Within the platform, you can set up conversion tracking on your website to get a sense of whether paid ads are providing the return on investment you were hoping for.

You might look back at your top performing organic tweets to get a sense of which ads stand to generate the most engagement — and result in more purchases, leads, etc.

Conversion tracking aims to reveal more about user behavior as it relates to paid ads. Twitter automatically logs traffic from your promoted posts, as well as the path users take through your tagged pages.

To drill down into actual revenue generated, you’ll need to apply the proper tag and event type to your base code. So, you might use a “purchase” tag to track items purchased during a campaign.

Retweet High-Performing Content

Things move fast in the Twitter-sphere, so there’s a good chance that most of your audience missed a Tweet the first time around.

If your followers are spread across several time zones, schedule the same Tweet to go out different times of day to optimize your reach.

Wrapping Up Twitter Analytics

Like anything else in the realm of marketing, you can’t improve without measuring your efforts. Luckily, Twitter comes equipped with some built-in tools that can help you understand your performance and adjust as needed.

If Twitter Analytics aren’t already a big part of your social media strategy, start uncovering insights using the information outlined above. Over time, you’ll begin to understand your audience and deliver the best possible content at the right time.